The other day, I’ve wrote about POWER8 ‘feature’ which requires from an administrator update of access keys in order to keep a server eligible for the firmware upgrade POWER8 – No hardware maintenance-no firmware upgrade . An administrator needs to enter these every few months, if a maintenance contract is re-signed every few months. This can be a headache, or something bigger if someone runs multiple servers. There is a secret HMC function, which can update the keys automatically.

Dynamic Platform Optimizer is a hypervisor function which rearranges logical partition processors and memory on the system to improve the affinity between processors, and memory of logical partitions. In this post I will describe when to use this function and how to prevent IBM i Lpar from crash. Read more of this post

In my previous post I’ve mentioned about the new HMC feature which can adjust CPU frequency. In this article I want to describe how to speed up the POWER system box, get more performance from the system. It is very easy to overclock the machine.

Since HMC firmware version 7.7.7, IBM added very cool feature, which allows installation of the Virtual I/O Server directly from the HMC. This is very convenient when you get your POWER machine to the new location, and you want to install an operating system, for instance, IBM i or AIX, but you prefer to do it remotely.

Nowadays, I’m preparing for huge hardware delivery. I’m about to get dozen of MMD’s. The challenge is to configure them (LPAR profiles, VIOS, etc) as soon as possible. I found the way how to automate creation of multiple VIO/LPAR profiles including I/O configuration for multiple servers without knowing SN of the expansions drawers.

One of the biggest and the most spectacular news which I’ve experienced on my last residency, was the completely new technology called Coherent Accelerator Processor Interface (CAPI). I was in big shock after a meeting with with the project leader. It sound for me as the holy grail for all I/O bandwidth and latency problems.

Finally the announcement day arrived. POWER8 and SR-IOV have been introduced to the world, and I can share my experience from my last residency.

Single Root I/O Virtualization are not new adapters, but this is a new technology, standard, specification. In fact, it uses adapters which are on the market for some time already. Specification allows to get a slice of a physical adapter and assign it an LPAR. This feature requires a proper hardware, firmware, and all elements around it.